Knowle West Boy

Domino; 2008

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The popular theory about Tricky, in short, goes like this: first he was angry and moody all the time and released brilliant records, and then he got better and happier and started making fluffy low-substance garbage. I'll concur with the fact that his last two CDs, Blowback and Vulnerable, weren't all that good, but this "happy Tricky = crappy Tricky" equation is still too easy an explanation for what happened to the man who largely helped define the way anxiety sounded in the 1990s. Tricky may have had a rep for being a bit surly, but his music, even from the beginning, seemed less attributable to anger and misery than it was to ambivalence and confusion, and it all came through a malleable if unique identity. Which is understandable: He grew up in a ghetto, but a largely white one, his family came from a multitude of nationalities and ethnicities, and he's long cultivated a semi-androgynous (or at least anti-macho) persona that dates all the way back to his youth, when his grandmother dressed him in girls' clothing.

But most of all, he's made it a point to toy with as many genres as possible without actually laying claim to any of them, channeling his lyrics through someone else's voice, and shedding labels as soon as the press can apply them. At best, this makes him a fascinating, unpredictable enigma; at worst, a rootless half-entity whose dick-around moments just so happen to have the weight of a fantastic early career attached to them. It's still not clear exactly where Knowle West Boy belongs on a scale between those two points-- all I can really say with what feigned authority one usually gets from a critic is that it's a Tricky album, though even that hasn't meant anything all that specific in who knows how long. Everything else about Knowle West Boy is just endlessly confounding: It's clearly better than the last two albums Tricky's put out since he decided to cheer up a bit and start feeling California, but it doesn't exactly come together in any tangible way.

Granted, there's a couple moments on this album that feel deep and heartfelt-- expressing a lingering resentment at the psychological beatdowns of class warfare in "Council Estate" ("They call you can't-go-straight/ They call you crime rate") or a longing regret at fathering a child he hasn't gotten the chance to connect with in "School Gates". But for all the mention in interviews and articles about how personal this album's supposed to be, many of the lyrics are evasive, at least when they're not flat-out empty. Maybe there's something embedded deep inside lines like "I try to choose, my shadow moves/ But don't last in my hovercraft" ("Far Away") or "You can go on to the internet, log in to your local war/ You can read your paper, receive a mental scar" ("Coalition"), but as they are they don't say much of anything. Couple this with Tricky's held-back, restrained voice-- which sometimes sounds like he's trying to sing into his own armpit-- and there's not a lot of evocation to be found.

His proxies fare a bit better, though there's another problem: There's way too many of them, and none of them stick around long enough to establish themselves. Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird were nigh on inseparable during his first few records, and his later work at least had a recognizable recurring voice aside from his own to carry much of a record's weight-- ragga singer Hawkman on Blowback, or breathy chanteuse Costanza Francavilla on Vulnerable. Knowle West Boy features a host of vocal collaborators, and while a couple of them might sound familiar-- Alex Mills spars wonderfully on the flirt-turned-squabble "Puppy Toy", while former GusGus member Hafdís Huld plays a hauntingly chirpy Christ stand-in on "Cross to Bear"-- most of them are relative unknowns who sing passably but lack the strident personalities that, for better or worse, held each of the previous albums together.

And even if the music itself is a lot more fleshed-out and smart than anything else he's done since the start of the decade-- genuinely hooky at some times, stripped bare and abrasive at others-- it doesn't quite cohere. To keep it simple, here's a brief rundown of the most identifiable genre signifiers in the first five tracks: leering lounge-blues ("Puppy Toy"), orchestral art-rock ragga ("Bacative"), semi-ambient, percussion-free neo-soul ("Joseph"), a stripped-down electro dirge ("Veronika"), and a big stoopid circa-XTRMNTR Primal Scream song ("C'mon Baby"). Little of it sticks to genre-bound conventions, but the pop-chameleon overload ends up feeling disorienting when it could've felt knowledgably eclectic. Still, seeing as how the bloated rock obviousness that torpedoed his other recent work has been scaled down to a more workable level, it's good to hear a wider range of ideas at play here. Once Tricky finds a way to tie it all together and remember how make it resound as strikingly as his own personality does, then we'll have something.